{"id":45593,"date":"2019-03-14T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T16:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/?p=45593"},"modified":"2019-03-13T22:53:10","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T02:53:10","slug":"waiting-for-the-day-characters-dont-default-to-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/14\/waiting-for-the-day-characters-dont-default-to-white\/","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for the Day Characters Don&#8217;t Default to White"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a post on <em>LitHub<\/em>,\u00a0Deena\u00a0ElGenaidi writes about the politics of representation of minority and marginalized communities in books and other media.\u00a0ElGenaidi notes that when characters are not described with specific ethnicities, readers &#8211; even readers of color &#8211; often default to visualizing them as white. Even a character such as Katniss Everdeen &#8211; described in <em>The Hunger Games<\/em> as olive-skinned, with black hair and grey eyes &#8211; ends up being portrayed by the blonde Jennifer Lawrence. Because non-white characters must be specifically described as such,\u00a0ElGenaidi says their stories often take on a political theme, and becomes about the character&#8217;s identity as a minority, rather than whatever theme the author might want to write about instead. &#8220;How can I write stories with Arab representation if I don\u2019t explicitly state it in the text? And if I state it in the text, does the story then become about that?&#8221; she asks.<\/p>\n<p>Food for thought.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/waiting-for-the-day-that-characters-dont-default-to-white\/\">Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Photo by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/YjVa-F9P9kk?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">Dmitrij Paskevic<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/search\/photos\/history?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a post on LitHub,\u00a0Deena\u00a0ElGenaidi writes about the politics of representation of minority and marginalized communities in books and other media.\u00a0ElGenaidi notes that when characters are not described with specific ethnicities, readers &#8211; even readers of color &#8211; often default to visualizing them as white. Even a character such as Katniss Everdeen &#8211; described in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[527],"class_list":["post-45593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-diversity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45624,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45593\/revisions\/45624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}